This is an extraordinary book (Into Extra Time – Living through the final stages of cancer and notes on the road by Michael Paul Gallagher, published by Darton Longman Todd, 2016), but first an admission: in 2011 I myself was diagnosed with cancer, I went to the hospital and had two major operations, I almost died, but by the grace of God I came out the other way: walking again in the sunlight and breathing fresh air a one more time. . So by admitting this, I suppose I am also saying that I have a certain bias in favor of a book that recounts such sufferings, since I have experienced some of them myself. And, of course, chronicling such sufferings is not wallowing in them or exalting them in some way; they are part of the human condition. As Philip Larkin observed in one of his great poems, Ambulances, they visit us all at one time or another: “They stop at any curb: / They visit every street in time.”
In fact, for Michael Paul Gallagher it was his third cancer visit that proved fatal. He had had cancer before, starting back in 2002, but it was his return in early 2015 when he traveled from Rome to Ireland to take a course that led to his death, at the age of 76. What the book does is multifaceted: it provides a mini-autobiography of his life as a distinguished Jesuit priest, teacher, and author; a deep insight into your beliefs and concerns, especially those pertaining to unbelief in the modern world; fragments of ideas about openings, darkness, revelation, imagination, transformation and transcendence; a cancer diary, detailing actual experiences and emotions as they occur; and finally a few stabs of his in poetry, which he himself admitted, “were never my talent”, but which in certain lines do achieve a serene beauty.
Interspersed despite all of the above, there is also a wonderful and revealing aphoristic quality in which he either nails some problem definitively, or simply cites the right authority to do so on his behalf. So here are three wonderful lines from his book:
“Now I began to see that faith is blocked much more by lifestyle than by ideas or philosophies”
“Relying on medical technology will end in disappointment”
“It’s very simple: how you live shrinks or expands what you can see”
It should be obvious from the above and the contexts in which these quotes occur that Gallagher is a deep thinker, which is not surprising given that he was a professor of fundamental theology at the Gregorian University. But along with the depth of thought also goes a deep humanity. Quoting Dr. Johnson, he observes that “death wonderfully concentrates the mind” and so, during the course of the book, the problems in his life begin to unravel: we feel his doubts, his hesitations, even his very real reservation that he should die. absolutely. knowing in fact, as we all know, that it will and must.
Particularly poignant is our growing awareness of how active and capable he was: always planning, programming, being helpful and productive, but now he finally has to live when he can no longer be any of these things. Even we learn and explore whether he had made the right decisions in his career. Yes, he rationalized, but should he have specialized more and be less generalist? Are you, we think, really convinced by your own answer? And most revealing of all: Monique, the young woman he met at 19 and the road not taken. Where is she now? What happened to her? Pray for her happiness and there is a poem for her. In fact, it is that poem that closes the book: Monique en Caen. Think about it, this Catholic priest, this Jesuit since he was 22 years old, his last word, a poem for Monique? Is this a figure for the Virgin Mary? I do not think so; here he achieves a rather sublime beauty in the final sentence:
… Or you can visit,
As I do, the wonder echoes
Of hands held and eyes intertwined,
Symbols of a love greater than
We could at twenty-one
But changing me at least forever.
The syntax of the last two lines is as tortured and complex as the emotion behind it; And for all of us, as human beings, we resonate as we reflect on our paths not taken, as death also wonderfully concentrates our minds.
There is much more to this book than space allows, but it should be obvious that, despite my bias in its favor, it is an eloquent, absorbing and fascinating work that I highly recommend to all Towards Wholeness readers – most impressive All in all, Michael Paul Gallagher keeps his faith in God intact despite all the illnesses and suffering caused by cancer. Buy and read this book; it is uplifting.